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Published Sunday, September 9, 2001 Frozen Assets: Sweltering South Florida is home to one of the coolest frozen fruit-bar brands around. It's 90 degrees outside. The road through your windshield shimmers with silvery mirages as sweat trickles under your collar. It's impossible to imagine as you pull up to a Hialeah warehouse, but it's frigid inside: Men in snow suits, heavy gloves and caps with fuzzy work in 25-below-zero temperatures, frost clinging to their boots and breath. It just doesn't get any cooler in Miami, and neither does the all-natural frozen fruit bars these guys are packing. They're not just cool, they're certifiably tasty: Five flavors of The Natural Fruit Corp.'s chunks O' Fruti bars - strawberry, pineapple, raspberry, mango and coconut - recently won awards of excellence from the American Tasting Institute. Other winners in their own right (only five flavors could be entered in the contest) include Caribbean mix (a blend of tropical fruits with flakes of coconut), creamy banana, passion fruit, lemon, lime, watermelon, chocolate yogurt, cappuccino, peaches and cream, cherry flavor and lime concentrate) and tamarind. Colombian brothers Simon Bravo founded the company in 1984 with brother Jorge Bravo Sr.; over the years they've gone from making 2,000 bars a week to 160,000 bars in an eight-hour shift -- more than enough to fill a huge truck. This didn't happen overnight. First the brothers put their engineering skills to work adapting old, broken machinery to make the fruit bars (and creating a one-of-a-kind mechanical wonder). Then they hired Douglas Gray to expand sales. At first he worked on commission in New Hampshire, peddling the bars to grocery stores and spreading the fruity word as far west as Michigan. Later he joined the company in Hialeah as sales and marketing vice president. The brothers also concentrated on cleanliness. Between flavors, the equipment is washed and sanitized and the night shift hoses the place down from top to bottom. A quality control lab on the premises tests every batch. "We decided to focus on one thing and do it really well," Simon Bravo says. Each bar starts off as fresh fruit or a fruit puree mixed with purified water and liquid sugar. The solution percolates in a huge holding tank with paddles that help break up the fruit. Then it's pumped into a cooler to chill; this helps it freeze faster, producing a smooth texture, the better to melt on your tongue. Next a machine squirts the mixture into metal molds on a conveyor belt. These pass through a freezing liquid, quickly firming the fruit mixture as a bank of wooden sticks drops down into the centers of the slushy bars. A minute later the bars are frozen solid They pass through a demolding station where they are spritzed with warm water to loosen them; then a gizmo clamps onto the sticks and pulls the bars from the molds. If they are to be chocolate dipped (strawberry and coconut get this treatment), a machine lowers the unmolded bars into a vat of chocolate. They then shoot out a conveyor belt, are crimped into plastic wrappers and end up in the packing area, where workers grab them off the line. From here the boxes of bars are collected by the freezer guys to load into the frigid storage chamber until it's time to pack them into trucks for transport across the country. Chunks O' Fruti bars are sold in all 50 states except Alaska (too cold?) as well as South America, Puerto Rico, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan and Canada. India is interested. A lick of intense, fruit-flavored heaven costs just $1.00 and 80 calories. On a sweltering South Florida day, the icy impact is priceless. Chunks O' Fruti bars are sold at Winn-Dixie, Sedanos, Walgreens, Farm Stores and many convenience stores. |
Natural Fruit Corp. - 770 West 20th Street - Hialeah, Florida 33010 |